You may all go to hell, and Tommy Lee Jones will go to Texas
By SASHA OLDERSHAUSEN
Tommy Lee Jones has a pig problem.
Feral hogs have been digging up his yard in their frenzied quest for grubs, rendering the lawn a patchwork of grass and dirt. Jones, never much a proponent of physical barriers, is reluctantly contemplating a fence to keep them out.
“I didn’t want any fences around the house,” he said from the office of his ranch home in San Saba, the small Texas town where he was born, to which he eventually returned as an adult, and where he’s registered to vote. “As you can see, the house has an architectural statement to make.”
Built as a fort in 1856 — “when Sam Houston was still alive,” he said — the house sits on 6,000 acres in the Texas Hill Country. It is a stately, two-story limestone structure with a pair of overgrown purple sage shrubs flanking its entrance — another wild thing requiring Jones’ attention.
For the private actor, who has little patience for the rituals of fame, it’s a respite from the public demands of show business. “It’s very alienating for him to be objectified so thoroughly,” said Dawn Laurel Jones, his wife of 25 years, “even in some of the most private moments that he can’t even process without being under a microscope.”
“There came a time when I became aware that I could live anywhere I wanted to,” Jones said from behind his broad desk, his slippered feet propped up on its cowhide surface. “So, in my wisdom, I went home.”
Now 80, Jones has spent a lifetime coming home, often bringing to the screen characters born of the same rough and rural landscape in which he grew up, yet resistant to its familiar stereotypes.
“He just didn’t play rednecks and idiots,” said Ethan Hawke, a fellow Texan. “He always played deeply complicated men.”
The latest is an estranged father whose depths are revealed slowly in the current season of FX’s “The Lowdown,” which is set in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The role marks Jones’ first return to television since the 1995 made-for-TV film “Good Old Boys,” which he directed, helped write and starred in.
“The Lowdown” was created by Sterlin Harjo, whose acclaimed series “Reservation Dogs” was also set and filmed in Oklahoma. Hawke stars as Lee Raybon Jr., a self-styled “truthstorian” — a semantic distinction he makes from the less flattering title of journalist, which is what he really is, albeit with a slippery sense of ethics. (He sleeps with sources, lies about his identity and, as a consequence of his various indiscretions, is very often getting beaten up.) Jones plays Raybon’s father and eponym.
The new season begins with an apparent homage to the opening sequence of Wim Wenders’ “Paris, Texas.” Like Harry Dean Stanton, Lee Sr. wanders through a spare, inhospitable landscape in a suit and red ball cap — one whose particular shade of red and white lettering conjures MAGA, though its inscription is biblical: “Psalm 107:29.”
Eventually, a police officer finds him confused and dehydrated along the road and delivers him to his son’s doorstep — a used bookstore where Lee Jr. works and lives. The resentful son reluctantly takes him in.
WHEN HARJO BEGAN WRITING the Lee Raybon Sr. character, he had no particular actor in mind. Then word came from Jones’ agent that he was interested — “I like his point of view, his style,” Jones said of Harjo — and the two arranged a video call. This came as something of a surprise to Harjo, who had imagined that Jones might not even own a phone, much less abide the virtual world. There is something about Jones that suggests he belongs to another era, where the trifles of modern life have little purchase.
The two later met in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to discuss the character. Harjo came away convinced that Jones would not only fit into the world of the show, but also into the world of its production.
“Tommy is very direct and to the point,” Harjo said. “I think it goes back to West Texas.”
Jones spent much of his childhood in Midland, where his father worked as a roughneck in the Permian Basin. He briefly attended what was then called Robert E. Lee High School, before winning a scholarship to St. Mark’s, a Dallas prep school, and eventually attending Harvard University, where he was roommates with Al Gore and wrote his honors thesis on Flannery O’Connor.
Harjo, who grew up in Oklahoma, recognized something familiar in Jones’ temperament. The two share an affinity for the Southern Gothic tradition, particularly the writing of O’Connor and William Faulkner, whose influence runs through “The Lowdown.”
Some critics have compared Jones’ 2005 film, “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada,” to Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying,” though Jones has denied any direct connection between the two. Inspired partly by the killing of Esequiel Hernandez Jr., a West Texas boy who was mistakenly shot by U.S. Marines, it’s a story about a man who carries his dead friend’s body home to Mexico that doubles as a damning portrait of border enforcement. It was one of the movies that inspired Harjo as a young filmmaker.
“It is looking at the world through big questions,” Harjo said. “It’s about life, and it’s about death, and it’s about love.”
“There’s something about rural America, the South especially, where it’s like, Don’t be a blowhard, be humble,” he added. “There’s not a lot of guys like him anymore, but I grew up with people like that.”
Jones doesn’t allow himself to be known easily, and his cowboy stoicism lends itself to a fierce sense of privacy. He is practiced at deflecting personal questions and has declined to speak publicly about a recent tragedy, the death earlier this year of his daughter, Victoria. Asked about the shocking recent Democratic victories in his home state, he said only that “The people have spoken articulately, and I have nothing to add.”
But “if there’s any sort of gruffness,” Harjo said, “there’s humor underneath it.”
His “Lowdown” co-stars agree. “He is hilarious,” said Macon Blair, who plays Lee’s sad-sack attorney. “It’s just that he’s never playing it for laughs. He’s so deadpan and so dry that it sounds thermonuclear.”
Jones’ sense of humor reveals itself unexpectedly. Asked what he made of the dispute over a border wall in the Big Bend region, where Jones has spent considerable time both filming and living, he offered a characteristically terse, diplomatic response: “I don’t like bigotry, and I love people.”
“It’s been said that the mother of Texas is Mexico,” he added. “We don’t know who the father is, but we think it’s Tennessee.”
He delivered the punchline without a trace of a smile.
BACK AT THE RANCH, Jones and Dawn were preparing to harvest oocytes, or immature egg cells, from two of their best polo mares. The plan was to fertilize them using frozen semen from a highly ranked polo stallion named Open Chimento, who is no longer alive, and transfer the resulting embryos to surrogate mares. This would allow their prized horses to continue playing polo while the surrogates carried their foals, Dawn explained.
“We are hoping for two foals standing on the ground a year from this May,” she said.
Jones, who grew up riding horses, took up polo in the 1970s. The ranch now has two polo fields and 25 horses, and the couple regularly hosts matches there. Though Jones no longer plays, Dawn competes regularly. During filming for “The Lowdown,” they brought four of their horses to Oklahoma so that she could continue training.
“She’s one of the better female polo players in the United States,” Jones said.
Jones’ next job would take him to Australia to film “Outside Man” with Ice Cube. Set in Texas, the film casts Jones as a retired Texas Ranger turned carpenter. Then, when filming wraps, he will once more return to the real place — home again.
“I knew that God loved me,” Jones said, “because he put me on the ground in Texas.”
